Job: Washington,DC - Usability/Information Architect

25 May 2005 - 11:20am

880 reads

Vera Rhoads

2005

It is a great project - a large scale intranet
redesign and this person will be part of my team. You
can send me your resume - or direct resumes to Jill
Stephenson - Stephenson, Jill
[JillStephenson at spherion.com]

Sincerely,

Vera Rhoads

Our client is looking for an Information Architect to
work in downtown, DC on a long-term contract.

INFORMATION ARCHITECT (HUMAN PERFORMANCE/USABILITY/WEB
DESIGN)
A highly experienced individual is needed who can
demonstrate the ability to help deliver highly
compelling and usable business solutions. The
individual will design the organization, labeling,
navigation, and indexing systems to support
navigation, searching, and browsing through very
large, highly complex, and comprehensive Web sites. It
is necessary to have experts in the fields of
information visualization and user-interface design
who are driven by a passion for making the user
experience as easy and productive as possible and
ensuring that users can easily find the information
they need. This job combines concepts from usability
research, user interface design, library science, and
traditional architecture.

A. Web-related design tasks

 Identify the mission and focus of a Web site;
determine who will be using the site, who is building
it, strategic and business goals, key usability
principals, technical constraints, and future needs.
 Develop high-level conceptual models of business
processes.
 Perform functional and task analysis to determine
transaction flow.
 Determine anticipated user paths, logical process
flows, and how to balance efficiency with ease of use.
 Construct a structure and method of organization of
information; organizing site content into categories
and assist in creating an interface to support those
categories.
 Map the entire structure of a site and organize the
positioning of pages within sections, developing a
functional and intuitive plan to get the user from
point A to point B on the path of least resistance.
 Design the organization, labeling, navigation, and
indexing systems to support both browsing and
searching to ensure that users can easily find the
information they need.
 Develop a metadata schema to support search and
retrieval of content and placement of content within
the Web structure.

B. Structure-related design tasks

The Information Architect will also have an important
role in providing structure for content created within
the organization. The advantage of developing content
in a structured form is that the content may more
easily be reused in different contexts, including
documents and web pages, and the content may be
repurposed for delivery in different media.
 Conduct inventories of Web-based content to identify
and categorize information types
 Support the continued development of
organization-wide metadata to identify information
types
 Create standard descriptions of information types
and develop semantic-based element names that allow
systems to extract components of content from larger
structures
 Develop standard XML-based component architectures
for each information type (detailed content units)
 Develop systems to identify variable content within
standard content units to allow for dynamic
repurposing and reuse
 Develop content plans that guide the assembly of
component into complete presentations (documents, Web
pages, and so on)

C. Qualifications

 Bachelor's or Master's degree in Information Design,
Technical Communication, or a related field required.
 Attention to detail and a strong sense of
organization
 Ability to organize information in a logical and
consistent fashion
 Strong logic and analytic skills
 Ability to ask appropriate questions and communicate
effectively to a broad range of people: users,
authors, designers, executives, artists, marketers,
producers, and technical staff
 Able to conceptualize the abstract and manufacture
the concrete to explain it